Take a look at your website in different browsers

02 November 2012

To have a website that would look the same on different browsers is an ongoing issue for most web designers all over the world. Why is it such a problematic task? The reason is quite simple- website visualization depends on many different aspects such as:

operating system of a visitor;

display resolution of the computer that a visitor uses;

browser interpretation of the web page.

If we make an in-depth research of the way that web pages are created, we will see that it takes writing codes in PHP, HTML or any other form of programming language. The structure of web page is not the same as a web browser reads the coding and converts it on the screen.

All web browsers have different display options, therefore a similar web page can look slightly different in varied browsers. If you’re interested to see the exact form in which a web page was originally built, right click on the page and view the source option. All those characters and symbols is the information that a web browser converts into a format understandable for Internet users.

Generally there are just a few browsers that people seem to set before the others, however there are many types of them found online. You can never know what type of browser your clients use. The most widely used browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari.

If your website uses submit buttons, edit fields, radio buttons and checkboxes, all of those elements might look different depending on the operating system of the user and its style. For example, a submit button can look like an oval in the XP style and like a gray rectangle on the Windows Classic theme. A custom submit button would be a solution in this case.

Display resolution is another factor that greatly affects the way a website is displayed on the screen. Too large pages may not fit the screen of your visitor. To fix this problem it’s recommended to not use the static dimensions and instead, use the width 100%.

To sum up all aforesaid, it’s essential to test a website on as many different web browsers and operating systems. If you notice any errors, try to find a solution for this issue on the Internet.